Cellphones Leapfrog Poor Infrastructure in Mali

Hugh Pickens writes "CBC News has up an article by Peace Corps volunteer Heidi Vogt, a woman who served in the small village of Gono in Mali five years ago and remembers letters dictated and hand-carried by donkey cart or bicycle to the next town. Vogt recently returned to see the changes that cellphone communications have made in a village that still doesn't have electricity or decent drinking water. 'Gono's elders say the phones can keep them in touch with their village diaspora,' writes Vogt. 'Villagers depend on far-off relatives to send money in time of crisis — if someone is sick, if a house has caught fire, if there's been too little or too much rain and the harvest is poor. There's a new sense of connection to a larger world. In a village where most people can't read or write, they can now communicate directly with far-off relatives.'"

Re:with out power it is hard to keep your phone ba

[RattFink]

From the article they charge them by connecting them to their car's battery.

Re:Wrong Solutions?

[philpalm]

I'm in favor of microloans but you need infrastructure to distribute such loans. If the diaspora keeps sending money and returns to their villages there will be signs of progress.

Cell phones and communication with the diaspora will help in the future, look at Armenia and the Philippines where their diaspora are a big help to their economies.

Then again the deportation of American rejects to El Salvador (MS-13) was not a good idea either...

Re:Phones before guns

[TubeSteak]

I actually don't think it's such a "nice" article, as it does very little to paint a bigger picture, except for this one paragraph:

The cellphone tower that services Gono wasn't built for the village. It was built in 2005 for the 25,000-person town of Douentza, 16 kilometres away, where there are people who work in offices and receive monthly salaries. Gono was just the lucky recipient of some of Douentza's spare coverage.

About 25% of Mali's population lives in 25 cities
Doutenze (at 25,000 people) ranks in Mali's top 20 cities
Mali is one of the 3rd poorest country in the world according to the UN*
The median age is 16

Here are the coverage maps for Mali:
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=ml&net=ik [gsmworld.com]
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=ml&net=mt [gsmworld.com]

Notice how little of the country is covered? This "news" is just a human interest story, a fluff piece designed to give you the warm fuzzies. That small village is not representative of Mali as a whole and anyone trying to extrapolate anything from such an example is making a mistake.

*2006 Human Development Index

Similar experience

[Manywele]

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural part of Tanzania from 1999-2002 and I went back to visit this last summer. When I arrived in 1999 there was one cell network in the country. It was in the (then) capital and most populous city of 2 million people, it had a capacity of 50,000 and was maxed out. A couple of competing companies starting setting up towers and by the time I left they had covered the major cities and arteries of the entire country. When I went back this last July the companies had moved out into the villages and most people in the country had local cell coverage. The area where I had lived was very hilly and somewhat remote so I thought that they would never get coverage out there but they had it.
You don't buy a plan like in the US, you buy a phone ($30 for a cheap model) and then you buy minutes (leading to some of the shortest phone conversations I have ever heard). People who live in areas without electricity find ways to charge them. Someone might buy a generator and set up a side business charging phones. Some people have to bike hours to the nearest town with electricity.
The difference in how people communicate was astounding. Kids away studying could keep in contact with their families back in the villages. Kids who had met in school but lived in different places kept in touch (I reunited a number of my former students by passing cell phone numbers around). Farmers could keep in touch with people in the markets. It was an amazing change.

I'm sure I'm not the only one here

[Neuticle]

but I lived in an African Village with no running water or electricity (90% of the time ) for 2 years. (Raise your hands RPCVs)

I had 3 (count them, one two THREE!) cell phone towers within sight of my house, and I could always hear the diesel generators at night if the winds lulled.

Would I have traded the cell phone for reliable electricity or running water?

HELL NO.

Cell phones improved my life and the life of the other people there tremendously. Electricity is about 1,000,000 times more expensive to cook with than charcoal, and kerosene lamps and candles make plenty of light. Water was scarce, but I had a no-flush pit toilet and an in ground rain-catch cistern for water. I only really used about 60l a week. The real problem was that not enough people had big enough cisterns (20% maybe), and many people had none. Water ran out in places at times, people suffered when they couldn't wash or bath as often, but no one ever died of dehydration for lack of a drink. If 60% of the houses had big cisterns, it would solve that problem.

Life without electricity and running water can be just fine. What is really needed is healthcare.

The hospital didn't have a single actual doctor after the foreign volunteer left. Pretty much everyone who walked in was told they had malaria and treated for it regardless. People suffered and died frequently from stupid, easily treated things. THAT was -IS- a tragedy.

Re:Wrong Solutions?

[WhiteWolf666]

BIngo!

That's why whenever I see protectionist liberals, I call them selfish bastards. Globalization is the *most* efficient tool of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor, worldwide. Just look at the Western (EU + US) trade imbalance with the Asian tigers & India.

Vastly more wealth has been transferred from the hands of the rich to the poor due to the last 15 years of globalization than the 50 years of Foreign Aid offered by the West AND the USSR.

Socialism (especially International Socialism) absolutely fails in attempting to redistribute wealth. Globalization *is proven* to be the answer to world poverty. The only important points are to keep it fair (no monopolies or corruption, please), and to open up closed states (I'm looking at you, Africa, and North Korea.)

Re:Good start.

[Neuticle]

While I admire your idealism here, I was never endorsing the idea that selling guns is fundamentally good in any way, I don't believe that. I was simply saying that you cannot take away or prevent the guns and expect the result magically to be peace.

Guns are tools, tools that can be used for murder, but as Africa in particular has shown us, people can and do commit murder and atrocities on epic scales without guns.

Re:Good start.

[kaynaan]

As much as I like to blame America for what's wrong in the world these days (And they are to blame 99 % of the time).

Where I'm from (Somalia), weapons are probably where you see the least American influence. The most common weapons you find are Chinese, Libyan, Russian made AK-47's. Although the M-16 was becoming popular when i was there last time. especially for it's light weight.

And similar to what the Original poster noted, our Telecommunication infrastructure is one of the top in East Africa, it is a True free market, absolutely no regulation, no taxes.

But aside from Telecom everything else in the whole, completely unstable, 17 year civil year, puppet interim governments (we have our version of Hamid Karzai).